


Spring Pilgrimage to the Place of Rejoicing

by Judas_is_a_Carrot_Top



Category: Seirei no Moribito | Guardian of the Sacred Spirit
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 17:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17349302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Judas_is_a_Carrot_Top/pseuds/Judas_is_a_Carrot_Top
Summary: He wanted to tell Balsa and Tanda that he found settling into his fate far more difficult than struggling with it. But it did not matter, it did not matter. He was the Holy Emperor of the New Yogo Empire. He was no longer Chagum; he had not been that boy in almost four decades.





	Spring Pilgrimage to the Place of Rejoicing

It was Chagum’s thirtieth pilgrimage to Sahnan, a pilgrimage he had made yearly since his nineteenth year. There were to be no processions heralding his approach, no national celebration at Sahnan. Only his sage and Jin were allowed to accompany him, though he knew that the rest of the Eight Warriors trailed unseen after them. During the first years he embarked on the pilgrimage, the Toumi Village elders and Shaman Torogai met him at Ayoumi Lake, but it had been years, years since he had last seen them.

At Sahnan he would prepare an altar of sig salua blossoms and incense and pour out flower wine over the dry rocks. Try as he might, though, he could no longer see Nayug’s glacial scenery, just as he could no longer see Balsa again. He could not permit himself the impropriety.  
As they approached the lake, he saw a familiar figure waiting by the shore. Young Jin drew his sword, and he heard branches rustle overhead. He held up his hand for them to hold and stay back.

He called out, “Nimka!”

He had not seen her in twenty years but he would recognize her from one life to the next. He dismounted from his horse but did not run to her, instead waiting with impatience as she approached him. 

“Your Imperial Majesty,” she said, and he felt such joy upon hearing her voice again. She prostrated herself before him.

“No, Nimka, Nimka, get up.” It was an effort to speak informally. He extended a hand to her. She lifted up her face to him, perhaps thinner with the shadows under her eyes starker, but still smooth and unlined under the dark topknot touched with white. She took his hand to pull herself up. 

“I suppose one never forgets the manners learned in court,” she said. There was that same smile he had first glimpsed under the path-severing charm so many years ago. She looked him up and down and laughed. “Your beard, it’s almost to the ground now.”

He held fast to her hand, despite her gentle attempts to disengage herself. He could not speak for the knot in his throat, a knot not of silence but of words that, unspoken for twenty years, had accumulated in a rush to be the first voiced.

Finally, he said, “Can you forgive us- me?”

Taken aback, she asked, “What for?”

He found himself, the Holy Blessed Emperor of the New Yogo Empire, uncertain and awkward again as young Chagum.

He let go of her hand at last, and she stepped back from him to a proper distance. “Whatever it was, Your Majesty,” she said, her voice gentle, “You were well within your rights.”  
Selfishness is not a right, he wanted to say. Instead he asked, “Do you think of-” he did not want to say the boy’s name aloud- “our son?”

“How could I not?” Nimka drew her heavy coat closer around herself, despite the air beginning to warm with spring.

“He would have been twenty-four years old today,” he said. He could remember so little of the child born of his pilgrimages. Out of his seven children, only the dead boy had the same blue eyes as his. Still, he dreamt often of walking with the boy through a garden dense with blooms and greenery.

Nimka said quietly, “Your eldest son is a warrior, your second a scholar, and your youngest is an artist. What would have been left for my son?”

He saw how Nimka’s gaze drifted to the clouds above them. The silence was broken when a child laughed with delight. He had not noticed the little girl standing by the lake, throwing stones into the water.

“Is that your daughter?” he asked, for he knew that Nimka had married after the boy died.

“My apprentice, Ibara,” Nimka answered after only a long pause. “Tadao’s youngest and the only girl.” She called her apprentice to her side. The girl drew back from the lake, skipped back, hopped forward, and finally slowed down into neat little steps when Nimka admonished her to hurry up.

Ibara looked much like Balsa. Her mouth curved into a familiar smile when she saw him. They stared at each other in recognition and he felt his heart beat so.

“Are you truly the Emperor?” she asked. He laughed and nodded.

“How are your grandparents?” He had not seen them in years, though he sporadically kept track of their movements. He provided them with a small pension, which he knew remained untouched until Tadao’s birth. He had kept Shaman Torogai’s note announcing the birth, which read succinctly: The idiots have named the boy Tadao. He remembered how he wept with joy and sorrow, for he knew that he will never see them again.

“Which ones? The ones in the city or the ones still hibernating in Hunter’s Cave?” Her voice had a note of cheerful irreverence in it, rather like Shaman Torogai’s. He envied her a little. Balsa would not have stood such cheek from him.

Nimka gave the child a gentle swat and said, “Her grandfathers spoiled her horribly.”

“I’m not spoiled!” the child cried out in protest.

“You should tell him a story,” Nimka said, “While I get his flowers.”

Nimka removed her coat and boots and waded out to the lake’s littoral zone to gather sig salua blossoms for him, just as she had first done when they were decades and lives younger. They were both twenty-one, he remembered. He had wanted to marry her, but he could not forsake his duty and so he became engaged to three unseen princesses instead. That was his duty, and was he not dutiful? When his sons were born, almost in quick succession- he was blessed, he was blessed- he returned to Nimka and begged her to return to the palace with him.

The child turned to him and said, “I have a story for you.”

“What is it about?”

“A garden in the western deserts,” said the little girl. “The most beautiful garden there is in the whole of Sagu.”

“More beautiful than your grandfather’s garden?”

The child nodded her head vigorously. “This garden is tended by a young Yakue healer who can see into Nayug and dreams often of water. The Water Spirit is very fond of him, because the young man speaks to it and because they share the same birthday.”

He remembered how Nimka and her stories always could convince him to run away from himself. Once he had tried to dismiss his passion for her as mere childishness, sure as the summer sun would soften into the breezes of autumn. Only it did not, or he couldn’t, and now he had wasted someone else’s life.

The child of a concubine did not stand to inherit the throne, especially if it was the fourth boy. Still, his official wives had grace enough to hide their relief upon learning the child had died. He himself could not grieve properly for the boy. Out of rather faulty memory, for he had seen the boy sparingly, he designed a memorial statue of a child asleep on a bed of sig salua blossoms. That was all he could do. He remembered his rage when he saw that the sculptor had obliterated any Yakue features from the statue’s marble face. Without the boy’s soft nose and full lips, the statue could have been that of some stranger’s child.

His sole expression of grief thwarted, he could not even comfort Nimka, who had fled back to Toumi Village after the boy’s birth and sudden death in the first few days of spring. Away from the mountains where she gathered her stories and sustenance, the court was slowly becoming her death.

He had not had a concubine since Nimka left. He tried not to resent his official wives, for such politics were a given. He had more children, all of them daughters, and how he wished the girls, properly distant and cold, were like this child by his side.

“Are you even listening?” the little girl piped up crossly. He laughed, for she sounded exactly like Shaman Torogai then.

“Yes, I’m listening, little one. Now go on with your story.”

“The Water Spirit would send a send a cloud or two to his garden when the weather is too dry. This way his garden thrived in the desert settlement of the Yakue.”

The girl smiled that familiar smile again, as if imagining the garden in her story. He thought once again of Tanda’s garden, its half-tamed wilderness far lovelier than the sterile order of the palace’s formal gardens. He remembered, too, the hollows under Tanda’s eyes as they waited for Balsa.

“I see you’ve memorized your thousands of stories already.” His hands were trembling, why were his hands trembling? He longed to be able to run across the water again, to where Nimka stood surrounded by sig salua.

“I only know one story yet,” said Ibara. “And it’s yours. Aunt Nimka told me that today’s his wedding day. Right now the young healer’s garden is blooming wildly. If you look to the west you will see the clouds gathering to bless the wedding with a little rain.”

The child took his hand in a hold surprisingly strong and firm for a child her age, gave it a squeeze, and then ran off to help Nimka. He was reminded of Balsa’s touch. He could have wept then. He wanted to tell Balsa and Tanda that he found settling into his fate far more difficult than struggling with it. But it did not matter, it did not matter. He was the Holy Emperor of the New Yogo Empire. He was no longer Chagum; he had not been that boy in almost four decades. He had long lost the ability to walk on water and see into impossible landscapes.

“You won’t return with me to court?” he asked Nimka as she came ashore. What a useless question to ask! He knew the answer already. He had known it for the past twenty years.

“Chagum, never.” Her answer had the finality of a shut door, an extinguished lamp. “But if I had not gone, I would have wondered for the rest of my life if longing is more painful than regret.”

“Is it?”

“Satiety, either its excess or loss, is often the cause of regret,” she intoned, a response so courtly they both laughed. 

“We- I- wanted to see you again, and you never answered my summons.”

“I stayed away out of respect for my husband and our children. Surely you understand. Besides,” and she smiled again, that same mischievous smile of autumns past, “I didn’t want you to see me grow old.”

“Yet we’re here now,” he said. It was not Nimka, after all, whom he could not bear see aged, but Tanda and Balsa.

“Yes, we saw each other again, and that’s done.”

They smiled at each other for the last time in this shared life of theirs. He felt the joy and relief of absolution when, turning to the west, he saw the clouds gathering heavy with rain. No, he had not loved Nimka for only a moment- she was and always would be the wildly blooming garden of his dreams where he and his blue-eyed boy rambled through. But now he must take the bag of sig salua from Nimka, mount his horse, and continue on to Sahnan.


End file.
